As one of the greatest inventions in the 20th century, the invention of the aircraft has realized people's dream of flying for thousands of years. While the aircraft is a double-edged sword for human beings, the catastrophe happens sometimes because of the aviation accident. For example, Air France Flight 447 with the complete fuselage crashed into the Atlantic Ocean at high speed, killing all 288 passenger, in June 2009; the TU-154 special plane of the President of Poland Kaczynski crashed during landing near the Smolensk North Airport—a former military airbase on the way from Warsaw to Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board, on 10 Apr. 2010; Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on 8 Mar. 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, causing more than 200 passengers missing. Whatever led to such a tragic aviation accident made people feel very shock and fear. According to the relevant information, about 1000 people died from aviation accident every year in the whole world and four civil aviation accidents happened causing more than 700 people dead or missing only in the first half of 2014.
When every major aviation accident occurred, people questioned why a passenger aircraft wasn't equipped with a parachute.
Finally, this idea is impossible and impractical to be denied because of high altitude environment and skill needed by parachuting.
While mankind have taken various of explorations how to avoid the aviation accident and how to keep people's lives safe during crash.
One of the explorations is that an entire civil aviation airliner is equipped with a large parachute and the practice applied for aviette has achieved success, however, the practice applied for airliner hasn't implemented and one of important reasons is that an airliner is too large and heavy. To make a large airliner, for example, Boeing 747 carrying about 500 passengers, land safely, twenty-one parachutes are needed and the size of each parachute amounts to a football field, therefore, the practice isn't obviously feasible. To reduce the number of parachute canopies, one way is to abandon all heavy components of the aircraft such as wings and engines in the event of an emergency and the parachute is only responsible for saving the cabin to reduce the weight that the parachute need to bear. While the system is very complicated and clumsy and multiple safety devices are adopted to prevent the failure of the parachute's spread. However, in case of emergency on the airliner, the situation can't be riled out that the parachute can't spread successfully.
In addition, the spread of the parachute needs a certain amount of time at a certain spatial height but the plane crash mostly occurs during taking off and landing at this time the height of aircraft is very low so that once the accident happens, before the parachutes have spread, the aircraft has dropped to the ground. Consequently, the adopt of parachute is theoretically feasible, but impractical.